Anal Glands

Ho! As Terry Barlow would say (If you don’t follow Terry Barlow (@terry_barlow) on Twitter, go and follow him now. He is an imaginary cat with excellent spelling. In the last few days he has been watching The Profeshonals. I am particularly fond of this tweet: THER IS A LADYS BRAR ON THE PROFESHONALS! I am not lucking untill it has gone.

Quite right too.

The replies are almost as marvellous as the ackshual tweet.

Would that my cats were as cultured as Terry Barlow. Sadly only Ronnie P likes the telly, and since he has taken up being Knighton’s answer to Chris Packham and embracing all the wildlife he hasn’t had time for that nonsense any more.

It has been a rather cat centric couple of days. Surprisingly it has been Anorak and not Ronnie P who was first to the V E T. They say it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch and it appears to be true in this case.

We noticed a few days ago that he had what looked like a fat lip. As is the way of my people, I hung him upside down in a head lock and poked it vigorously (this is what reading James Herriot does for a woman. I am the world’s best amateur vet now) and stared into the jaws of death. He didn’t seem to be in any pain due to the fact that he didn’t lacerate me or bite my nose. He did however, smell like a shed full of herrings when he breathed lovingly into my face. I made a mental note to buy different cat food, and kept my eye on him.

The lip kept swelling until he looked rather like a bantam weight prize fighter and yesterday I called the V E T and popped him over there last night, much to his utter disgust. My theory was that he had, on his timid forays into the garden, stuck his snoot into something he shouldn’t have and got a sting for his pains.

This was the V E T’s best theory too, until she went to take his temperature and noticed that he had hugely distended anal glands. These are words nobody needs to hear, frankly.

I then had to stand with his head in my armpit while she milked them and I did a lot of mouth breathing and was very grateful for the fact that I still don’t have my full complement of nasal flexibility back yet. She believes they were so uncomfortable that he kept licking them until he gave himself a fat lip.

Which is nice.

He has to go back in a week for a check up and we have to change his food as she thinks it’s because the cheaper brand of cat food we bought to try and economise doesn’t have enough fibre in it, and this, apparently can bung your anal glands up good and proper. So now I have one old cat who has to have posh cat food because she has irritable bowel syndrome and cystitis if we have the wrong food, and one (potentially two) cats who get bunged up anal glands if we have the wrong food and I am wondering when moggies got so precious and why it cost me £95 to watch a woman milk a kitten’s bum?

This morning I got up to find that only Ronnie P and Derek were pooting about my person. They both had quite a lot to say, and as they had food, water and clean litter trays it seemed that there were other things on their mind. It transpires that they were doing Skippy the Bush Kangaroo but in cat. I thought Anorak was sleeping, but no, he was missing. I spent an hour turning the house upside down, because kittens are dicks when it comes to squeezing themselves into small spaces, but to no avail.

After my coffee (I needed fortifying) I set off into the wilds of the garden. After much poking about I could hear a mournful cry. I thought it was coming from next door, but it turned out to be coming from under the decking. He had climbed into a hole a young badger had dug to get under the deck last year, and was all alone, in the mud, sad and sorry for himself, frightened of the rain and the wind. It took me twenty minutes to coax him out. He was filthy and had tufts of fur missing and was very, very miserable until he got back into the warm.

He is feeling much better now that he has put muddy paw prints all over my soft furnishings, picked his toenails out and Ronnie has bought him a lot of wet leaves to play with.

I am covered in mud and have leaves in my fur and have spent far too much time over the last two days saying the words ‘anal glands’.

They don’t tell you any of this when you think about what life will be like when you’re grown up, do they?